Workshop on Search in Social Media (SSM 2009), co-located with
ACM SIGIR 2009 Conference on Information Retrieval
Held at Northeastern University
July 23, 2009
Home Instructions for Authors Workshop Program Program Committee
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Workshop Overview    
Social applications are the fastest growing segment of the web. They establish new forums for content creation, allow people to connect to each other and share information, and permit novel applications at the intersection of people and information. However, to date, social media has been primarily popular for connecting people, not for finding information. While there has been progress on searching particular kinds of social media, such as blogs, search in others (e.g., Facebook, Myspace, of flickr) are not as well understood.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together information retrieval and social media researchers to consider the following questions: How should we search in social media? What are the needs of users, and models of those needs, specific to social media search? What models make the most sense? How does search interact with existing uses of social media? How can social media search complement traditional web search?  What new search paradigms for information finding can be facilitated by social media?

Search in Social Media 2009 follows up on the highly successful SSM 2008 workshop held at CIKM 2008 in Napa, CA.  Nearly 50 attendees from academia and industry gathered for an informative and interactive day of talks, panels, and discussion.  We are looking forward to an equally exciting workshop at SIGIR 2009 in Boston!
Workshop Topics 
We solicit submissions on topics at the intersection of information finding and social media, including, but not limited to:
  • Searching blogs, tweets, and other textual social media.
  • Searching within social networks, including expert finding.
  • Searching Wikipedia discussions and revision histories.
  • Searching online discussions, mailing lists, forums, and community question answering sites.
  • The role of human-powered and community question answering.
  • Novel models of information finding and new search applications for social media.
  • The role of timeliness, authority, and accuracy in social media search.
  • Interaction between traditional web search and social media search.
  • User needs assessments and task analysis for social media search.
  • Usability studies of people using social media search tools.
  • Interactions between searching and browsing in social media.
  • Searching and exploiting folksonomies, tags, and tagged data.
  • Spam and adversarial interactions in social media
Ideal papers may include late-breaking and novel research results, position and vision papers discussing the role of search in social media, and demonstrations of prototypes or working systems.
Format    
We are planning for a full-day workshop consisting of invited speakers, contributed and invited paper sessions organized in panels, and a poster session. We will solicit short (under 4 pages) papers describing late-breaking and novel research results, position and vision papers discussing the role of search in social media, and demonstrations of prototypes or working systems. Details on the submission process are here.
Important Dates  
  • June 16: submissions due
  • June 29: notifications
  • Jul 9: final papers due
  • Jul 23: Workshop (8:30am-5pm)
Workshop Chairs